Typical physical networks include many routers and switches through which packets travel. In some cases for such networks, an administrator may identify that packets are not being delivered correctly, and therefore may wish to troubleshoot the network. For instance, the “ping” functionality may be used to identify whether one machine is reachable from another machine.
However, in at least some virtualized networks that operate many separate logical networks over the same physical network, packets are typically sent across the physical network in tunnels between managed forwarding elements. These tunneled packets may not take the same path as typical ping packets would, as the ping packets do not go through the encapsulation/decapsulation process. As such, while using a standard ping operation may determine that two host machines in such a network could communicate, this operation would not serve to replicate actual logical network traffic.